Bio

Megan Green is a visual artist from Newfoundland who was part of a worker migration to the oilsands in the 1990’s; she completed an MFA at the University of Waterloo in 2014. Megan participated in the Banff Centre’s 2016 BRiC On Energy residency. Work from this residency was presented at the Petrocultures 2016 conference at Memorial University of Newfoundland, at the University of Edinburgh’s Postcards from the Anthropocene 2017 conference exhibition and published in Energy Cultures from West Virginia University Press. Her work was also included in the 2017 Alberta Biennial of Contemporary Art. Megan was an artist residence at the Klondike Institute for Arts and Culture in 2018. In 2019 she presented at the Animal Remains conference at The University of Sheffield. She has been the recipient of production grants from the Ontario Arts Council in 2017 and 2021, and of the Canada Council for the Arts 2021 Explore and Create program. Recent publications include an essay in Popular Inquiry: The Journal of the Aesthetics of Kitsch, Camp and Mass Culture, and a forthcoming paper in the International Journal of Cultural Studies. In 2022 Megan Green had a solo exhibition at the Tina Dolter Gallery in Corner Brook, Newfoundland and was a resident artist in the Banff Centre’s Ecologies of Precarious Abundance: Queer Life and Natures, visual arts thematic residency.

Artist Statement

I use objects and their associated narratives to contextualize mining in the geo-cultural landscape; specifically examining class, gender, and personal experiences I have had growing up in northern Canada around the ‘tar-sands;’ in a region that is often considered one of the worst examples of natural resource mining in Canada and often described in apocalyptic terms. I explore the sort of encounters such spaces might generate, and what might be seen in them which could be put into service in understanding our contemporary petroculture. My work has a narrative sensibility as the objects I choose to work with tend to be cultural artifacts related to my own and a somewhat generalized experience of being a part of the worker migration to the region. Kitsch- petroleum plastic objects, and tacky home décor- and its association with class is used in my work with an awareness of the stereotypes associated with such places. I am interested in how the stories we tell about ourselves in domestic contexts effect the way that we understand our relationship to place, and the interplay this has with popular narratives and personal memory.

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